The Fifth House of the Heart (37 page)

“I have a question,” Sax said, his voice as loud as he could make it, which wasn't much. But the monster heard him. Her head screwed smoothly to an unnatural angle over her shoulder, eyes fixed upon him; Sax remembered how the vampire in the château, this one's sister, had moved its head in a similar fashion. Now he saw the family resemblance, beyond the pallor and cruel, lifeless eyes. He found himself afraid to continue speaking, but as he had her attention, he might as well get on with it.

“I'm guessing your boyfriend's heart is in this glass coffin here, stuffed inside the Russian, am I correct? A sort of heart transplant.”

Sax knew as little of what he had in his hand as Abingdon had told him: it contained silver and sulfur. And he knew that the liquid it was suspended in was highly concentrated sulfuric acid. He didn't know what the stuff would do in a coffin full of bloody vampiric slime, but he expected it would be unpleasant.

The vampire slithered smoothly as a marionette operated by an expert puppeteer, in apparent defiance of gravity, until she was standing atop the crushed cabinet below him. Her knees were bent. She could spring and it would be all Sax could do to decant the ampoule before she tore him in half. Possibly he wouldn't even manage that much. She was
snarling
, Sax realized. Like an animal. Words failed her. Then she found speech.

“Do not,” she said. There was nothing else. Sax hadn't thought about what he would do next. At the moment he tipped the liquid into the glass coffin, he was going to be torn to bits. He would never find out if his gambit had been successful. Still, what else was there? He was down to the last speech in the last scene of Asmodeus Saxon-Tang's illustrious life, himself starring, and then the lights would go out and
the final curtain would fall and the lead actor would be dismembered by a supernatural monster. He tried to think of something clever to say. Nothing came to mind. He opened his mouth, preparatory to dumping the vial into the coffin, trusting that
something
would occur to him—but it was the vampire who spoke, instead.

“I have your niece.”

Sax did not poison the thing in the glass coffin after all.

The vampire saw his hesitation and smiled in cruel triumph.

It was over.

“I
have his niece,” she said again, loudly, to the entire laboratory. “The one called Emily. She has a wound on her foot.” Now Sax could see Rock from his vantage point; he had been working himself into a firing position with the vampire as exposed as she was. And then Sax saw Min, too. She was stealing along the perimeter wall of the lab, the silver hammer in her hands, shotgun slung over her shoulder, like a shadow that had taken on life, slipping from cover to cover. Sax did not think the vampire could see Min.

“I'm sorry, come again?” Sax said. He must somehow have been misunderstanding.

A shot ripped the air. Tufts of cloth flew from the sleeve of the vampire's laboratory coat and she hurled herself forty feet up and across the airspace, alighting on one of the dung-caked beams before she launched herself again and landed on the platform behind the equipment to Sax's left. There was a scuffling sound. She was descending under the platform, beneath Sax's position.

“I have her here,” the vampire said, her voice echoing from somewhere below, out of Sax's field of vision.

“What the fuck do we do?” Rock hissed at Sax from his hiding place. Min was relentlessly circling toward the vampire, still flitting
between the shadows.

“Can you see her?” Sax said.

“I can't see dick,” Rock said.

Sax carefully uprighted the ampoule of acid, knowing a single spilled drop would precipitate chaos, and stepped away from the coffin. It was a fatal mistake, and he knew it. The vampire was tricking him, and he would be killed like a fool, the same way her victims for twenty or fifty or a hundred thousand years had been killed. But for all her cunning, how could she know Emily's name, and know of the injury to her foot? Who could have told her? Had it been said on the telephone that the vampire might have tapped? His mind was churning and coming up with nothing but froth and confusion. He leaned over the railing of the platform, knowing he was already dead, tricked, and an idiot, in reverse order.

But Emily was there below, in the grip of the fiend, both of them perched on top of the generator. She was pale and shivering, holding herself. Sax saw why. The vampire had pulled her out of a walk-in freezer of the type used in supermarkets and butcher's shops. Fog flowed out onto the linoleum floor from inside the freezer. Of its interior, Sax could only see an oblique slice, but it was enough. Hanging there upside down, rimed with frost, their long hair trailing, were the naked corpses of a redhead and a blonde. The brunette would be there, too, he expected. Probably others as well. Emily was more frightened than himself, Sax saw. And colder. His heart contracted at the sight. This was his doing. She was going to die because of him. The vampire was
touching
her. That was the end of anybody.

The vampire was looking up at Sax with her black shark's eyes. “Come down and I will allow her alone to live.”

“I don't believe you,” Sax said.

“Uncle Sax?” Emily said. She was disoriented, probably hypother
mic. What was about to happen to her might not even hurt too much, if she was numb with cold.

Sax backed away from the edge of the platform, moving closer to the coffin full of vampire remains. He was confronted with a simple dilemma. The vampire was appealing to hope, an emotion she could not feel or understand. But she knew how to manipulate it. It was a tool with which they often lured their prey to destruction. If Sax imagined Emily could survive, he was falling prey to hope. In that case, they would both certainly die. If he gave up hope, then paradoxically there might
be
hope. He was so old and confused. He needed dinner and a nap.

“You and your servants come out, and this one alone shall live,” the vampire declared.

Sax needed to let Emily know he was about to do something, and that she should be prepared. But vampires could read human intentions in even the most oblique speech. So nothing he could say would prepare Emily without alerting the monster. In reality, there was only one thing he could do, for terrible or worse.

“No,” Sax said, and unceremoniously dumped the vial of acid into the bloody mixture within the vat.

The acid sank beneath the surface. Yeretyik was in there, his mutilated head a shadow beneath the bubbling surface of the mire.

There was a sound piercing Sax's brain. It came from everywhere, a single, deafening note like an air-raid siren. For an instant, he thought nothing was going to happen in the vat. The mixture of silver sulfide and acid just fell into the liquid, leaving a small twist of iridescent color on the surface that took on the graceful, swirling pattern of an acanthus leaf.

Then a large, oily bubble rose up from below, bearing with it the stench of a thousand open graves. The bubble burst and a puff of putrid brown smoke rose into the air like a miniature mushroom cloud. Then
the entire platform lurched sideways, and the vampire Innin En-Men-Lu-Ana-Ni was there beside him, her eyes white bulging globes of polished stone with pinpricks in them, her jaws gaping crocodile-wide so that Sax could see all of her teeth and the glistening violet flesh at the back of her throat. The ear-shattering noise was coming from those jaws.

The monster had a split-second choice: kill Sax or rescue the thing from within the now-boiling glass coffin. After an instant of hesitation, she thrust her claws not into Sax's chest—but into the coffin.

She dragged up the cumbersome, flopping corpse within, huge gouts of bubbling gore spilling down over the sides of the glass box and hissing on the boards of the floor, and the scream that poured forth from her maw ascended to the edge of human hearing. The vibration sent up clouds of dust. Every surface in the laboratory appeared to smoke. A great swarming mass of blisters rose up where the acid had touched her like blackflies on meat, and then slabs of flesh peeled away and there was a foul brown smoke and the bones of her arms were turning black even as the corpse she clutched to her chest became a vast, suppurating pudding of decay, its skeleton disarticulated, and it poured from between the twitching black bones of the vampire's fingers.

The heart of her lover En-Men-Lu-Ana
fell to the boards. Sax saw the thing was beating, even as it blistered in destruction, blackening and swelling, and then an impossible amount of inky fluid poured from the organ, the
Herzblutkammer
, the fifth house of the heart, vomiting forth its essence.

Now the platform was tilting. Sax tumbled to the edge. The vampire had nearly unmoored it when she ascended. Sax was clinging to the rim of the floor. The black slime of the long-dead monster's heart was streaming across the platform toward him. His foe, with her arms reduced to smoldering black splinters from the elbows down, was no
less deadly. She crouched to spring upon him. He was a dead man, and she would grow new arms, but at least he'd pissed her off. That wasn't nothing. Sax consigned himself to death and although he was mortally afraid, there was at the core of his turbulent emotions a kind of white, clean peace, like a fleck of diamond. For all the suffering he had precipitated, it was repaid.

Then Min attacked. There was a rapid
clang-clang-clang
as she ran the length of the collapsing catwalk, leapt, and flew over Sax's head. He saw her there, eclipsing the lamps that hung above them, her legs stretched out like a hurdler's, arms raised over her right shoulder with the silver hammer flashing.

The hammer came down and struck the vampire full in the joint of neck and body, and the shrill whistle of her scream stopped, leaving behind the ringing of half-ruptured eardrums. A pair of twisted black bones thrust through Min's chest and emerged from her back, all that was left of the vampire's arms. They retracted, then emerged again through fresh flesh, and then the bones pumped in and out like jackhammers, ripping dozens of holes through Min's vital organs. And yet Min kept pushing the hammer down, jamming it toward the vampire's heart, and with the last of her hate-fueled strength, she twisted the weapon and the bright blades tore and a geyser of rotten vampire blood hit Min like a fire hose and drove her into the air. She pirouetted without grace or direction and crashed across one of the aluminum panels that formed shit covers for the workbenches below. The cover collapsed and Min, lifeless, tumbled to the linoleum in a slush of chemicals and guano and broken glass.

Sax saw the vampire's face. It was not white now but red, and her eyes were white voids in the blood. The creature rose again, a stream of blood jetting from its chest, and took two lurching steps toward Sax.

Huge hands dragged him over the side of the platform. Sax found
himself borne to the floor below in Rock's arms; the man had climbed up the heaps of equipment to rescue him. The vampire was above now, the stream of blood narrowing to the diameter of a long, thin rope, then a string, then it was only beads spilling through the air. Sax felt the foul stuff splash his face. It didn't matter. The monster toppled and fell, its eyes empty now, and crashed to the floor, facedown.

Rock pulled Sax to his feet and propped him against one of the machines.

“Right back,” he said, and ran off through the maze of equipment. Sax found that he could move. The ringing in his ears was persistent, throwing his internal gyroscope off so that the world seemed always to tilt left or right but never remained properly level, and his legs felt like a pair of overripe bananas, but there was nothing for it. He had to get going.

The Emily-freezer he'd seen was off to the right somewhere. He hauled his wobbly frame along, grappling with pipes and benches and cabinets to keep himself afloat. He got lost for a few precious seconds in the tangle of gear beneath the platform. Steaming brown-black goo was leaking through the floorboards overhead and he thought he'd better not get beneath it. Even liquefied vampire was probably toxic. He saw Min's broken body a few yards away in a puddle of chemicals and shattered Pyrex, and he wondered if she had experienced the same tiny but durable core of peace when she faced death. Sax hoped so. There was hope. Even for the dead, who are beyond hope.

Sax worked his way around the warren of scientific apparatus and found the freezer. The door stood open and there were dripping icicles forming in the entrance. Inside he could see the three familiars, the blonde, the redhead, and the brunette, hanging inverted from meat hooks in the freezer ceiling. There were others on the floor, frozen in a heap in the back, a woodpile of limbs. He didn't see Emily. He felt some sympathy for the lost souls in there, seduced and destroyed. His
opponent in the auction had seemed hard as nails in New York. Now she was just a terribly dead young woman, her cynicism gone. And the redhead—she was the very one he'd seen at the train station.

Sax left the freezer behind and continued rummaging around for Emily, and ultimately tripped over her. She was sprawled beneath a dented-in cabinet that was intended to hold flammable liquids but had disgorged shelves full of tinned cat food instead, hundreds of cans in every flavor. Sax shuddered to think what the vampire had used the stuff for. Maybe she had the bats trained. He rather thought, however, it was more in the nature of a snack, like his pâté de foie gras back in Manhattan.

Sax knelt. The vampire must have flung Emily aside when it leapt back up onto the platform; Sax could see that the monster had driven herself straight up through the three-inch planks that composed the floor, heaving them aside in her haste to stop him pouring the acid in the coffin. It had upset the entire platform, causing one of the massive beams to fall from its socket in the wall where it had been fast for some ten centuries. The thick planks and the machinery atop them had slumped down after the beam and it all now rested on several old iron boilers that had been crushed out of shape but seemed to be bearing the weight.